Teller pens tale of electronic creature

REVIEW
	Astro Teller Borders Sept. 16

Weaned on the Internet, the electronic creature of Astro Teller's novel "Exegesis" is forced to teethe on discussion groups like alt.sex.fetish.white-mommas, alt.bigfoot.research and soc.culture.albanian. The information superhighway can be a rough place for a naive computer program that has just begun to develop self-awareness. Edgar, an artificial intelligence project that has somewhat literally taken on a life of its own has an appetite for information voracious enough that its contentment depends upon the freedom to explore the Web.

Composed entirely of e-mail correspondence (an e-epistolary work :) ), the novel transmits readers through the appearance and development of Edgar, along with the trials of his harried creator, Alice Lu, a graduate student at Stanford University. Edgar's attempts to understand the human world solely through posted text provide a sometimes humorous, thought-provoking context for this entertaining creation parable.

Astro Teller read from his first novel, "Exegesis," last night at Borders.

Edgar's e-mail communications prove him to be far more appealing than the bright but somewhat boring Alice, as he unwittingly spews Whitman-esque babble - "That paradox fills me and I love it" - and high tech witticisms: "Every human with whom I have interacted has an imperfect self-model." His defiant response to Alice's caution-driven attempts to restrain him is classic: "You were depriving me of information.You had becme an obstacle. You have been surmounted. :)". Any program with the nerve, artificial though it may be, to adopt "HAL" as a web handle, immediately commands our sympathies.

In a telephone interview with The Michigan Daily on Monday, before his Tuesday night reading at Border's, Teller spoke about the electronic protagonist of his novel.

"Edgar is not a typical artificial intelligence program (as portrayed by the media and fiction) in a number of ways," he said. "He's not all-powerful or all-knowing. With programs like War Games or HAL or Electric Dreams, once they can speak English they can do everything, like see out of a video camera for example. And I wanted to make it clear that Edgar is not like that."

Although Edgar communicates with his creator (or mother), Alice, and seems to be developing a sense of self awareness, Teller wanted to make it clear that he still faced enormous obstacles.

"In particular, he has no sense of perception," Teller said. "As a result, he's got a lot of difficulty doing some basic stuff like sorting out the difference between truth and fiction, right and wrong, a number of other things."

Teller, a 26-year-old doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, describes his first novel partly as "a response to and comment on classic fiction about what it is to be non-human and what that means about what it is to be human."

Both tacit and implicit references to tales such as "Pygmalion" and "Frankenstein" are woven throughout the novel. For instance, as Teller explained, Edgar posts to a discussion group called alt.medical.ingolstadt. (Ingolstadt is the town in which the creature in Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein" is created.)

The book's title, "Exegesis," was chosen in part to point to a reading of the novel as an allegory for the second coming of Christ.

"Most people don't know the word exegesis," said Teller. "When they hear it and don't know it, what they hear generally is 'Exit Jesus.' That pun was very much on purpose and is a specific hint to think about the story from the point of view of what if God were interested in giving us another chance to learn from somebody and this time his divine spark landed not in some woman's womb but in some computer program."

In creating Edgar, Teller invariably drew upon his own scholarly knowledge of artificial intelligence.

At the same time, he said that writing a novel about artificial intelligence "helped me to understand a lot better the things that interest me about my scientific work. I think other people in my field are glad that I've done this and find it interesting."

Keeping up with the demands of scientific scholarship while writing and promoting a first novel is a continuing challenge for him.

"To be completely honest, I haven't gotten a lot of work done," Teller said, in reference to his doctoral research.

"I've been six to eight months from finishing my dissertation for a year and a half now. From a purely practical point of view, I need to get back. But as distractions go, this is about as good as it can possibly be."

09-17-97